by Jane Delury
“Of course,” I said. “If that’s what you want.”
I, on the other hand, that same night, told my husband everything. On the edge of our bed, I answered all of his questions. I felt an exquisite relief at the sight of his tears, at the way he raged, at the sound of the names he called me: “salope,” “menteuse.” I’d felt freed from my marriage since leaving the Metro with that number in my pocket. This freedom was sweeter, to be freed from my lies. “You’re right,” I told my husband. “I have no excuses.” I agreed that we should separate. I knew what I’d ruined and that there was no going back. I thought, too, now that the initial shock and grief, the sobbing in the chapel, had ended, I would make another life, a third one. My children would come to my new apartment, which would be decorated in my style—whatever I found that to be—in a building with a view of a square. I’d make them American pancakes and lardons cut thick like bacon. I’d paint their rooms the colors they wanted, and we’d go to museums on Saturdays. I’d be that mother on the beach in Saint-Tropez with the two children and the picnic basket.
When we told them that we were divorcing, the children looked up from the couch with an incomprehension I’ve never seen on anyone’s face. You mean Maman will not sleep here every night? Will we go to the mountains together still during the summer? Will we decorate a Christmas tree? Who will read us our bedtime story? Who will make our breakfast? Who will walk us to school? And the worst question: “Why?” Because your mother decided to climb on her bike and ride away somewhere else, having felt she’d circled here for too long. In my defense, I thought I was taking them with me.
One night, not long ago, the children with my ex-husband for the week, I sat at my computer looking up former classmates from high school in Chicago, old boyfriends, my roommate at Berkeley, fellow Tumbleweeds, my former lover, his wife, and, as the lights went on over the Seine, Olga and Hugo. He is still at Syracuse, an old man on a webpage who teaches literature and French grammar and a special topics course on the poetry of the French colonies. About Olga, I found nothing.
I looked up Rado Koto, a member of the French avant-garde, according to Wikipedia, a surrealist poet, a bisexual, who hanged himself in a hotel room not long after the publication of his second book of poetry. One website blamed Koto’s suicide on his heroin addiction, another on his HIV status, another on his financial difficulties. Or maybe he suffered from clinical depression? Who knows? In the year since my husband and I told our children that we were divorcing, I’ve learned that I know only one thing: when your children ask why, you want to give them a good answer.
The last name I looked up that night was the one that mattered the most. There is a woman named Élodie Boyer who works at a French school in New York, in charge of marketing. I am going to choose to think that she is the Élodie I once knew, that she is happy and healthy and still likes to watch birds, just as I choose to believe that my marriage ended because something called love went away, not that my husband and I would still be together if one afternoon I had chosen a different seat on the Metro. There’s no going back from where I am now to say to Olga, I understand. “Silly girl,” she said. “What can you possibly know about love?” I thought she was talking about Hugo.
Eclipse
1890
On the first of April, in the courtyard of the Léger estate, Yvette Mongrain was scrubbing down the glass tables and wrought-iron chairs that had been brought by train from Paris the morning before and arranged on the flagstones. A spring wind was on the rise, whining through the bushes of the topiary and making the trees of the forest dance. Tonight, by the time the foie gras and oysters had been served and the wild boar rolled out from the manor on its bed of braised endive, the women’s décolletages would have erupted in goose bumps and their husbands’ noses gone pink. But none of them, Yvette thought as she plunged her rag into a bucket of water, would ask for the wraps and overcoats hanging in the manor. The rich never admitted to growing hungry or lonely or cold.
In the hard light of morning, the glass of the table showed both of her chins, the squared lump of her nose and the wispy hair pinned tight to her head. She’d once been a slight girl with clear skin and a quick smile who seduced a procession of men before giving her heart to Gustave, the head gardener at the Léger estate. She’d been that girl when Monsieur Léger’s father returned to his native village, after years spent overseeing the work of silkworms in China, accompanied by engineers and architects who chopped a road into the forest and cleared a space in the trees for the manor and a servants’ cottage. She’d been that girl the day that she stood at the front door of the manor and lifted the brass lion head knocker, her references in the pocket of her well-mended coat, Gustave’s good-luck kisses still warm on her neck. She was less of that girl when she walked with Gustave down the aisle of the church of Benneville and became even less with the birth of her son, who died after only a week, leaving her with swollen breasts and glossy trails down the sides of her waist. That was the same summer that the elder Monsieur Léger and his wife arrived at the manor with the colicky child whom Yvette had rocked through her own grief, whose first steps she’d applauded, whose picture books she had pretended to read, whose fevers she’d cooled, whose nose she’d wiped, whose tears she dried the summer that his mother left the house early, and the next summer when she didn’t come at all. And now that child, this very morning, had looked down his no longer adorably stubby, now straight nose and told her that he’d seen out the window that the tables looked dirty and could she do something about it? The tables that she and the housemaid had spent hours scrubbing the previous afternoon.
“Glorious day, n’est-ce pas?”
Yvette looked up the façade of the manor. Three stories in the air, Madame Léger had come to her balcony in a fluttery dressing gown. Yvette didn’t know if she was supposed to answer this question. Madame was always asking questions that seemed to require no answer. Are you glad, Yvette, that you never had children? Do you think my hands look older than they did last month? Do you ever feel, Yvette, as if you were drowning in an ocean and you can’t remember how to swim? The night after Gustave died, having quivered with fever in bed for a week, Madame Léger knocked on the door of Yvette’s room, holding a bouquet of jonquils.
“How dreadfully lonely you must feel,” she said.
Her eyelashes beat back tears. Yvette stared at her dumbly, her hand on the doorknob, her bare feet cold on the floor. As the spicy scent of the jonquils floated past her into the shuttered room, where the smell of male sweat was already fading, she wanted to say that she and Gustave hadn’t touched each other in more than ten years, hadn’t even had the passion to fight, had built between themselves a wall of silence and that it was that wall that she missed, the sturdiness of it, not the airy things that she knew Madame Léger was imagining. Instead she said, “Merci,” and, after shutting and locking the door, shoved the bouquet under her mattress.
“I asked the housemaid to press your new gloves,” she called up to the balcony. “I think you will need a stole. No doubt, it will be chilly tonight.”
She was pleased that she’d said this, even though Madame Léger was no longer listening. She stared out at the forest, holding the railing, the black spindles patterning the white of her dressing gown. Yvette started on another table. The sun had changed position. In the glare of the glass she saw a faint suggestion of herself next to Madame Léger’s smeared reflection, which rose higher.
Yvette turned in time to see Madame Léger cascade into the air, down the creamy run of the façade, past the open windows of the second floor, the dressing gown billowing around her bare ankles like a failed parachute.
On the west side of the manor, in the rose garden, Pierre Frontin heard a wet thud and thought that a flower box had fallen from a window. Another mess he would have to clean up. He pinched a bruised petal from a Queen Elizabeth rose and dropped it on the ground. He was a thin young man with the articulations of a praying mantis and the tight face of a c
ockroach. His wife had sun-cured skin, breasts that were simply another roll of fat on her chest, and buttocks as white and lumpy as goat cheese. She wore men’s boots under thick skirts, trimmed her nails with her teeth, and smelled of lye and regurgitated breast milk. So Pierre didn’t have to worry about her sleeping with the postman when he was out. While Monsieur Léger was constantly having the trim of the manor repainted to mask the damage wreaked by storms and sun, the paint of the servants’ cottage, where Pierre lived with his family, couldn’t peel because there was no paint. The grass outside didn’t need to be mowed because it was wild grass, meant to grow wild. He didn’t have colleagues with high expectations. He didn’t have a weak stomach from the stress of being important. He wasn’t resented by the men who worked for him because no one worked for him. He wasn’t stupid enough to host a dîner en plein air on the first day of April.
By now the tightness was gone from Pierre’s throat. He even felt lucky as he moved around the bed of roses, noting the holes made in the leaves of the Louis Philippes by a still-nursing slug. When the elder Monsieur Léger was alive, bugs and rodents stayed out of the rose garden, and off the grounds of the estate. Even as an old man, his back so bent that his mustache nearly grazed the grass, Monsieur Léger, père, had walked spring and fall mornings through the gardens to the forest with his mushrooming basket. On his return, basket full, he’d stop to sit by the fountain, surrounded by the marble muses with their exposed breasts and frozen smiles, their offerings of lyres and harps and masks. “C’est un paradis,” he would say to Pierre as he looked out on the grounds. “I have been far and wide in this world. No place compares.”
But his son, Monsieur Léger, fils, had no respect for the forest and so the forest had no respect for him. The summer that he arrived with his wife in their enormous carriage, the deer jumped the wall and devoured the lilies. Hawks and swallows pelted the flagstones of the courtyard, pine needles clogged the fountain, oak leaves littered the paths between the topiary bushes. The lives of the servants were consumed with erasing the forest’s trash from the part of the estate that Monsieur Léger could see from the courtyard or from the back windows of the manor. Unlike his father, Monsieur Léger never walked the grounds, and you could for this reason get away with things. You could, for instance, prune only the side of the bushes that faced the house. Monsieur Léger wanted things to look nice, not necessarily to be nice.
Pierre flicked the slug off the leaf and moved on to the Bourbon roses. When he’d worked for the elder Monsieur Léger, he would have crushed the slug between his fingers, searched the rest of the plant, and drawn a ring of salt around the roots. He would have never thought to cut corners. Every morning, shears in hand, he walked the path of the topiary, checking the curve of a vase, the roofline of the pagoda, the complicated upward sweep of the dog’s tail, the dip that made the shape in its mouth resemble a bone. He knew that the elder Monsieur Léger, from the windows of his study, could see Pierre working so hard and with such precision. He believed, as he had once believed his mother’s stories about forest gnomes and fairies, that this recurring sight would result in his being mentioned in Monsieur Léger’s will, that he could pick and pluck and prune his way into a life like the one Monsieur Léger, fils, led at his fancy Parisian school. All day long he worked beside Gustave, whose rants and wheezy sighs filled him with pity. Think, he wanted to say, of the tulips that rise from the iron-poor soil in the beds at the side of the manor, the rhododendron that rerooted itself after being torn from the ground by a boar, the chestnut tree that grows on, into the sky, despite the fungus that must be scraped from its bark every spring. He’d tried once to explain these thoughts to Gustave as they sat together in the rose garden, sharing a sausage and a round of Brie. In response, the old man lowered his hat over his eyes, let out a belch, and rolled onto his back for his afternoon nap.
Then, one evening, the elder Monsieur Léger collapsed, face-first, into his plate of quenelles, leaving everything to his son, who hadn’t been to visit the estate in years. All through that fall, winter, and spring, Pierre continued to manicure the grounds with the same rigorous tenderness. When Monsieur Léger rode up to the manor the next summer in his carriage, he wore a sharp mustache over a tight mouth, and his wife wore furs even though it was June. Monsieur Léger called Pierre into his father’s study. With a sour glance at Pierre’s boots, he said that the peony beds at the front of the manor were as fussy as death and should be ripped out, and that he wanted the topiary cut into modern, geometrical forms.
“We must drag this pile of rocks out of the last century,” he said. “I don’t want my guests thinking I’m a stuffed shirt.”
That afternoon, as Pierre dug up the peonies, minding not to damage the roots so he could replant them in front of his cottage, Gustave walked by with a bucket of concrete for a crack in the fountain.
“Stop caring so much,” Gustave said with a grunt. “It will get you nowhere.”
Pierre wasn’t a stupid man. He recognized that Gustave had cared so little that he had walked home from the café in Benneville in a rainstorm, and caught a cold from which he never recovered. You needed, he had decided, only to care enough to survive.
He collected the roses and dumped them behind the potting shed. As he walked around the side of the manor toward the courtyard, past the triangles and squares of the topiary, he wondered whether the unfortunate flowerpot was the clay one with hideous faces carved on the front that Monsieur Léger had brought back from some country in Africa. Rounding the corner, he saw Yvette looking down at a white mass, one hand on her hip, a rag dripping from the other.
On the east side of the manor, Dominique, the chore boy, sat in the chestnut tree, his legs dangling down either side of a branch. So far he’d heard and seen nothing, save a loud thump and a squirrel with a crooked tail. He was beginning to think that he’d chosen the wrong tree. Madame Léger had said the big tree with the twisted branches, but he wondered if she’d meant the oak tree that stood behind the topiary.
She’d come to him the day before as he worked in the potting shed, cutting a pine plank in two. She wore a liquid dress with a low-cut bodice. When she said his name from the doorway, the saw grazed the flesh above his knee.
“Viens, s’il te plaît.” She turned back toward the manor. “I need you. A plant is dying.”
Dominique hurried behind Madame Léger, his leg stinging, the saw shrilling in his hand until, not knowing where else to put it, he dropped it on the grass. He followed her through the servants’ entrance to the manor, along the tiles to the oak floors, where the walls changed from paint to shimmering silk, up the marble staircase, down a hall covered with paintings of Monsieur Léger: Monsieur Léger, a wide-eyed baby on his mother’s lap, Monsieur Léger, a toddler in front of his father’s factory, a young man flanked by whippets, astride an elephant, kissing the hand of the pope, in the basket of a montgolfière, to a foyer, where Madame Léger stopped next to a set of long windows and pointed at a fern with tobacco-colored fronds.
“I tell the housemaid to give it water,” she said. “Who knows if she does. La pauvre plante a l’air de plus en plus misérable.”
“It needs more light.” Dominique dragged the ceramic pot closer to the windows. Madame Léger watched him with a distracted smile, her shoulder blades balanced on the wall, the rest of her body dripping toward the floor. As he snapped a skeletal frond from the fern, Dominique glimpsed for the first time a misshapen tooth at the corner of Madame Léger’s smile, gray and melted-looking, before her lips shut down and she brushed by him toward a nearby door.
“You should take a look at my husband’s cactus,” she said.
In Monsieur Léger’s study, a globe sat on a pedestal next to a desk with brass hinges, the only spots of light in the room, since the curtains were closed. On the windowsill, a cactus bolted from a pot. While Dominique prodded the soil, Madame Léger opened the liquor cabinet and took out a bottle of cognac. She set two glasses on Monsieur Léger�
�s desk, then filled each one to just under the rim.
“Did you know?” she said, after taking a sip, “that there was a drink named after me once? ‘Gisèle’s tears,’ it was called. Funny, since I never used to cry.”
Dominique shook his head, although he did indeed know about the drink. He had heard all of the stories at the servants’ table regarding Madame Léger’s past as a courtesan, a “slut dressed like a lady,” Yvette liked to say. She’d ride afternoons through the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in a lemon-colored carriage, her hair dyed to match. In her apartment over the Seine, she had a caged parakeet that sang dirty songs and a secret cupboard to hide her lovers when their wives came knocking. She’d been served naked, sprinkled with parsley, to a cousin of the emperor. Now, though, her décolleté was cracked like the varnish of her husband’s desk, and her chin wanted to meet her neck.
Dominique wiped the soil from his fingers on the sleeve of his shirt. He gulped the cognac, watching the open door.
“Don’t fret,” Madame Léger said. “He is out shooting. He spends the first four hours trying to locate the trigger.” She licked the rim of her glass and set it back on the desk. “He ordered a boar from the Vosges for tomorrow night’s dinner. He may be a poor huntsman but he is not stupid.”
Dominique tried not to smile. He’d once assisted Monsieur Léger on a hunt with a guest. Monsieur Léger marched over the pine needles and oak leaves, describing in a too-loud voice how he’d hunted big game in Africa and crocodiles on the Amazon. When a fox darted from its den, Monsieur Léger shot a log. Another time, Monsieur Léger had asked Dominique to come along on a mushrooming expedition meant to impress a man from the national senate who was from the coast and thus knew nothing about mushrooms. Monsieur Léger couldn’t tell a chanterelle from a morel. By the end of the outing, he’d tossed several poisonous mushrooms into the senator’s basket. That evening the senator was driven away by fast carriage, sour-faced and retching as, in the kitchen, Monsieur Léger berated the cook for having undercooked the porc à la moutarde and “giving a great man worms.”